Environment

How Does Immigration Impact The Environment?

Progressives for Immigration Reform is committed to the creation of a sustainable society in the United States, one that secures essential natural resources for future generations and preserves flourishing populations of all native species in perpetuity. It is our position that the United States will fail in these efforts, if we fail to stabilize our population. As David Brower, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, put it, at the dawn of the environmental movement: “We feel you don’t have a conservation policy unless you have a population policy.” [1]

PFIR seeks to preserve open space, farms and wildlife habitat from sprawl. That’s why we support new parks and wildlife refuges, and improved land use, transportation and zoning policies. But over half the sprawl in the United States is caused by population growth. Unless we stop population growth, sprawl will continue to gobble up undeveloped land. [Continued below]

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth?

David Attenborough narrates this BBC program. He says: “Today, we are living in an era in which the biggest threat to human well-being, to other species, and to the Earth as we know it, might well be ourselves.”

PFIR wants the United States to take the lead in combating global climate change. That’s why we support higher mileage requirements for cars and trucks and increased funding for mass transit; replacing coal-fired power plants with solar, wind and other alternative energy sources; and higher efficiency standards for heating, cooling and insulating new buildings. But in recent decades, four-fifths of the increase in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has come from U.S. population growth, as more people drove more cars, built more houses, ate more food, and did all the other things that generate carbon. [2] Unless we stop population growth, America will continue to generate too much CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases.

Some environmentalists argue that Americans only need to focus on fighting pollution and reducing our consumption, in order to curb environmental destruction. They are right to argue for decreased consumption and increased vigilance against polluters, but wrong to assume that such efforts can take the place of stabilizing our population. A growing population can swamp improvements in consumption or pollution abatement. In fact, we have seen this happen regarding national energy use and carbon emissions in the past few decades, as greater efficiency in per capita energy use has failed to keep pace with increased numbers (more “capitas”). Total energy use and total carbon emissions have risen, due to population growth.

Ecologists use a formula to measure environmental impact, developed in part by John Holdren, the Obama administration’s chief science advisor: I = P x C x T. Here I, total environmental impact, is a function of three factors: P = total population, multiplied by C = consumption per person, multiplied by T = the technology used to facilitate that consumption. All three factors are equally important in creating overall environmental impacts. None can be neglected, if we hope to limit our impacts and create a sustainable society. As President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development put it:

“Managing population growth, resources, and wastes is essential to ensuring that the total impact of these factors is within the bounds of sustainability. Stabilizing the population without changing consumption and waste production patterns would not be enough, but it would make an immensely challenging task more manageable. In the United States, each is necessary; neither alone is sufficient.” [3]

One of the Council’s ten main recommendations for creating a sustainable society was: “Move toward stabilization of U.S. Population.”

Some American environmentalists argue that overpopulation is solely a global problem, not a national one, and that it requires an exclusive focus on global solutions. They are right that worldwide population growth is an immense environmental problem, but wrong to think that addressing it is best done by ignoring U.S. population growth. The U.S. government should finance and encourage family planning efforts in developing nations, to help them slow their population growth. We should stick up for the rights of women in international forums and encourage female literacy and economic empowerment in poor countries, since securing these rights and furthering these interests are both the right things to do, as a matter of justice toward women, and they have proven successful at reducing fertility rates around the world.

However, Americans also need to attend to our own house. The United States is the third largest nation in the world, and our population is growing rapidly. The largest 10-year American population increase was also the most recent one: 36 million people added to our population between 1990 and 2000. Our most direct and important responsibility regarding global population growth is to end population growth within our own borders.

In addition, while many progressives like to think of ourselves as “citizens of the world,” concerned for the well-being of all humankind, those of us who remain citizens of the United States, have further, particular responsibilities. As Americans, we believe we have a special responsibility to preserve wild species and wild landscapes right here, in our own country. Our children and grandchildren will blame us, rightly, if we fail to preserve opportunities for them to get to know and appreciate wild nature. They will blame us, rightly, if we fail to preserve clean air, clean water, sufficient topsoil to grow food, and all the other resources essential for their well-being. In other words, we have a duty to future generations of Americans to create a sustainable society. Continued population growth makes achieving that goal impossible. So we must end U.S. population growth.

However, in order to stabilize America’s population, we must reduce immigration, since today it is high immigration rates that are driving continued rapid population growth in the United States. During much of the previous century, population increase was fueled primarily by high native birth rates, but in recent decades, the total fertility rate of American women has fallen dramatically: from 3.5 children per woman in the 1950s, to 1.7 children in the 1970s, to 2.05 children today. According to a recent study from the Pew Hispanic Center, 82% of population growth between 2005 and 2050 will be due to new immigrants arriving and their descendants. [http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=85]

With a total fertility rate slightly below 2.1 children per woman, today the United States is well positioned to transition to slower population growth in coming decades. If we can encourage slightly lower birth rates among American citizens, we could stabilize our population sometime later in this century. If we do not reduce immigration, however, our population will balloon over the next hundred years, and continue growing with no end in sight.

Skeptical? Consider four numbers: 310 million, 377 million, 571 million, and 854 million. 310 million is the population of the United States as we write these words, at the end of 2010. The last three numbers are population projections for the year 2100, according to a study by the U.S. Census Bureau. [4] Each of the three projections holds fertility rates steady, while varying immigration levels, so annual immigration rates make the main difference between them.

Under a zero immigration projection, the U.S. population continues to grow throughout the 21st century, increasing to 377 million people, 67 million more than our current population. Under a “middle” projection, with immigration a little less than one million annually, we instead add nearly 300 million people and almost double our population by 2100, to 571 million people. And under the highest scenario, with over two million immigrants annually, our population nearly triples by 2100, adding almost 600 million more people by the end of the century, to 854 million people. Obviously, according to the Census Bureau, immigration makes a huge difference to future U.S. population numbers.

A booming population has numerous harmful ecological effects beyond the sprawl and increased greenhouse gas emissions we have already discussed. It increases water use. It accelerates deforestation. It furthers crowding, which in turn makes it harder for young American to connect with nature, furthering “nature deficit disorder.” As Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, asked in a speech in Madison, Wisconsin in March, 2000: “With twice the population, will there be any wilderness left? Any quiet place? Any habitat for song birds? Waterfalls? Other wild creatures? Not much.”

Population growth also increases our dependence on fossil fuels, making the U.S. more likely to resort to deepwater oil drilling and more susceptible to disasters such as the recent BP Gulf oil spill. Indeed, it is hard to think of a single environmental problem that is not made significantly worse by population growth, or that could not be more effectively met if we could stabilize or reduce our population.

As the Clinton Council on Sustainable Development put it ten years ago: “The sum of all human activity, and thus the sum of all environmental, economic and social impacts from human activity, is captured by considering population together with consumption.” [5]

As President Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality put it, in a report twenty years earlier: “The United States should . . . develop a U.S. national population policy that includes attention to issues such as population stabilization.” [6]

As the great conservationist Aldo Leopold put it, fifty years before that:

“If there is any question of “superiority” involved at all, it is whether we will prove capable of regulating our own future human population density by some qualitative standard, or whether, like the grouse, we will automatically fill up the large biological niche which Columbus found for us, and which Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford, through “management” of our human environment, are constantly making larger. I fear we will. The boosters fear we will not, or else they fear there will be some needless delay about it.” [7]

American environmentalists face a choice. Ultimately, our environmental goals can only be accomplished if the population of the United States stops growing. This will only occur if immigration is substantially reduced, preferably by bringing immigration numbers in line with emigration numbers. We must choose between sustainability and continued population growth. We cannot have both.

3 President’s Council on Sustainable Development, “Towards a Sustainable America: Advancing Prosperity, Opportunity, and a Healthy Environment for the 21st Century,” 1999.

4 Frederick Hollmann, Tammany Mulder, and Jeffrey Kallan, “Methodology and Assumptions for the Population Projections of the United States: 1999 to 2100.” Population Division Working Paper 38, table F (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

5 President’s Council on Sustainable Development, “Towards a Sustainable America.”

6 U.S. Council of Environmental Quality and U.S. Department of State, “Global 2000 Report to the President,” 1981.